Engaging with the public directly puts you in contact with a lot of interesting people. In the public lectures and museum work that I’ve done, I have met a large number of really compelling people, most of whom are more knowledgeable and passionate about history than the professoriate would fear.

But, as any public historian will tell you, occasionally you encounter a fun one.

One of mine occurred during the Q&A section of a public lecture I gave several years ago on the depiction of Robin Hood in film and television. In the back of the room, a perfectly normal-seeming man stood up and, with a twinkle in his eye that I couldn’t quite place, asked me a question that I won’t soon forget:

“What if it’s all a lie?”

I’ll admit, I didn’t quite know what to do with that question.

He then launched into a monologue describing a bizarre theory—one which I have come to find out is not just his own—that concludes simply: the Early Middle Ages did not exist.

This man was describing to me (and a group of increasingly confused audience members) the Phantom Time Hypothesis. In short, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, developed and promoted by journalist Heribert Illig and historian Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz, posits that the historical period between 600AD and 900AD simply didn’t exist.

Several years ago, I became good friends with a woman who had been abused by her previous partner. Abuse is shockingly common; her experience is not all that unusual. She confessed to me that she would wake up bolt-upright at 3am, shaking from night terrors. Things that would remind her—even just a little—of her previous partner would send her into a tailspin. Even saying his name could overwhelm her and give her a full-blown panic attack.

Her story is, sadly, not that unusual. But what made her experience particularly bad was that she had an exceptional memory—something approaching either what psychologists term an Eidetic memory or Hyperthymesia, where one can easily recall with great precision images and events from your past. Being able to remember everything from where you put your keys to the little wrinkles around your first child’s eyes may sound like a dream, but for her, the experience was a waking nightmare.

For her, counselling and therapy helped her to eventually make the memories—if ever present—less intrusive in her daily life. It allowed her, if not to forget per se, to choose what to remember on any given moment.

And perhaps ironically, that is one of the chief ways in which we, as a society, use history: we use it in order to decide what to remember and what to forget.

This is part three of our continuing series on “The Uses of History.” You can find parts one and two here and here respectively.

Pixar’s new film Inside Out does a wonderful job of exploring something we all are intimately familiar with, but which we only rarely think about: our emotions. The study of cognition—meaning our explicit thought processes and consciousness—has been a part of psychology and neurobiology since the 1960s. But it is only relatively recently that the scientific study of emotions (an interdisciplinary effort lumped broadly into the category of “affective science”) has emerged.

It can be assumed by humanists (such as me), that people in the past had the same emotional responses that we do—they experienced joy at their successes, sorrow at their losses, and had hope for and fear about the future. But, these historians provocatively ask, outside these broadest of terms, what if they did not experience emotions in the same way that we do? What if emotions themselves are culturally (and therefore temporally) defined? What challenges does that present to our historical empathetic imaginations—which I have argued is the core activity of creating good history—if these people do not just think differently than we do, but feel differently than we do?

There’s a common idea floating around that needs to die. It’s common enough that I have heard it several times in the last months, both in professional contexts (in the mouths of august and eloquent professors) and non-professional ones. That is the idea of the “average person.”

The idea of the “average person” takes the form of the “average public” when discussing what people think about the medieval world, “average student” when in the mouth of a professor, or the “average visitor” when it comes to the museum. In common parlance we even have snappy phrases for the idea—“John/Joe Q. Public”, “John Doe”, “Tom, Dick and Harry”.

Let me be quite clear. “John Q. Public” is not real. And even if he were, we have absolutely no reason to pay any attention to him. He is, at best, a sly cover for the speaker’s ill-informed views, and at worst, a rhetorical trick designed to reinforce the status quo and the tyranny of the majority.

This continues our series on the uses and importance of history. For our previous article on the topic, click here

If you didn’t sleep through your Psychology 101 course (and I didn’t… entirely…), you may be familiar with the theory of the Mirror Stage of child development. To recap: the Mirror Stage was proposed as a crucial part of child development by Jaques Lacan in the 1930s. Lacan proposed that at the age of about 6 months, a child begins to become fascinated with images of themselves in a mirror (or any reflective surface), but it takes them until about 15 to 18 months until they consistently recognize that what they are seeing is their own body. If you have children, or are allowed to borrow any occasionally, you probably can recognize this.

Lacan however, as was his wont, went beyond a simply mechanical understanding of this child development phase and applied it to a concept altogether more abstract. To Lacan, the Mirror Stage was a crucial moment—perhaps even a crisis— in a human’s developing subjectivity. To him, a child coming to terms with itself in the mirror was a shocking revelation that our “self” is not just a free-floating sort of consciousness, but is contained within a body that is both crucial to and external from that self; in his terms, that there is a separation between the body and the Ego.

The problem with narcissists then, in these broadly Freudian/Lacanian terms, is that they have not successfully moved past this phase of development—that they can’t look away from the mirror.

This obsession with ourselves, however, is far more common than that, and not limited to compulsive mirror-gazers. We all suffer from a related concept also explored by psychologists—the False-Consensus Effect. You certainly are familiar with it—the false-consensus effect is the tendency for people to incorrectly assume that other people are just like them—share their opinions, their beliefs, even their way of thinking.

It can lead you to think that yours is not just the right opinion, but the only one. Dangerous, indeed.

This error is rampant in politics; rich candidates for office have been particularly vulnerable to it, assuming that everyone shares their rarified lifestyle, and one response to it is the “check your privilege” meme. This has led to gaffes and idiocy in debates as wide ranging as the minimum wage to foreign policy.

History and the Mirror

And so, I come to the nut of it. The second way that studying history is useful is that it helps you to resist the false-consensus effect. When studying history, we encounter people who are, in ways large and small, fundamentally unlike us. They are not just separated from us in time. They have a fundamentally different way of looking at the world that informs what they believe to be right and wrong, how they live, and what they value.

Intensely studying the lives of people fundamentally different from yourself can be a useful corrective. It is a reminder that our perspectives are not just shaped by ourselves but by our times, and reminds us that we are not the final arbiters of reality and truth. In short, studying history can help us to shatter Narcissus’ mirror.

So, to again use the metaphor of the imagined dinner party—when asked why you study the past, you could do better than to reply: “Studying history reminds me that not everyone is like me. It helps me be less egocentric.”

The Paradox of History

For those regular readers, this may seem to fly in the face of what I wrote before about empathy. I can’t possibly have it both ways—history can’t possibly allow us to see ourselves in others and also recognize their fundamental difference from ourselves, can it?

To me, that is the fundamental tension inherent in history, both as an academic discipline and on a more philosophical level. It is the tension between recognizing people’s fundamental and specific difference from us – historicizing them – and recognizing their inherent similarity to us – empathizing with them. One arm pushes them away, one arm draws them closer. One views history as a social science, one as one of the humanities.

In reality, it is something of both. It is impossible to create histories—rendering limited evidence into logical narratives—without using a well-informed imagination. And that imagination is based, in large or small ways, upon empathy. But only using imaginative empathy when writing history can lead to wild flights of fantasy, or perhaps the cardinal sin of history-making: anachronism.

So, whether we acknowledge it or not, all historians must strike a balance between those extremes. How that is accomplished is what ultimately decides an individual historian’s style, perspective, and methodology. And this is, in large part, what I try to explain to my students when they ask how two historians could possibly come up with equally-valid but totally contradictory interpretations of the same evidence.

Yes, it’s a paradox. But unlike what some of the complainers in my class might say, this is not a weakness, but one of its key strengths.

For those of you who don’t know me personally, I am an American. Having just returned to the USA for work after an extended life abroad, this little fact is very much on my mind. My American-ness obviously passes without notice or comment on my current continent, but I was simply not accustomed to that in Europe. There, no matter how long I stayed, my nationality and accent always set me slightly apart.

Among my friends, my American-ness usually either went without comment or elicited a bit of gentle ribbing. It simply was one aspect of my life. But some of the most push-back that I fielded when living and working abroad had to do with my profession– and why I, as an American, chose it.

Essentially, some were surprised that an American would devote their life to the study of the medieval world.

Academics weren’t the culprits, if nothing else than because of tradition; today there are as many (if not more) American medievalists as there are European ones. American scholars have been among the leaders in the field ever since the field began.

But to some others there remains a certain confusion of why, in the great Venn Diagram of life, the “American” circle would overlap with the “medievalist” one.

America: A land without a Middle Age

The American Middle Ages in its Totality

The confusion is understandable. Aside from a damp corner of Canada, there simply was no Middle Ages in North America. I am aware that this may be surprising or even controversial– even among historians– but it is important to recognize that “the Middle Ages” is not just a temporal category, but a geographically- and culturally-specific one.

The idea of the Middle Ages was conceived by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century as a way of setting themselves apart from what came before. They wanted to distance themselves from what (they argued) was a time of darkness that engulfed the gap between the glories of the Roman Empire and their glittering present in the fifteenth century. (This is, by the way, rubbish on a wide variety of levels but that is the topic of another post…)

And while there is argument over exact dates, causes and effects of the Middle Ages, contemporary historians usually maintain that same rough paradigm: the Middle Ages is bookended by the Romans and the Renaissance; between empire and nation, between the beginning of hegemonic Christianity and it’s fragmentation.

Defining the Middle Ages this way is different from simply saying “the tenth century AD”, which, though counted differently in each of the world’s calendars, provides a global chronology which is the same everywhere, more or less. But “the Middle Ages” is a term just as culturally to specific as “the Meiji period” in Japan or “the Vedic period” in India. Similarly, it is just as absurd to discuss the “Chinese Middle Ages” as it would be to discuss a “European Seven Warring States period”. Thus, there is no Middle Ages in the Americas, outside perhaps a fleeting Norse excursion in Vinland.

And it’s for that reason that I can understand why I often field puzzled looks at dinner parties where Europeans ask, “the Middle Ages? Why did you decide to study that?” It belies a feeling that the Middle Ages is theirs, not mine. In honesty, I suppose I might wonder the same question about an Indonesian person who was an expert in the American revolution.

But this mindset only illustrates just how ingrained in us is a nation-centric conception of history, and the peculiar limits of what is “our” history versus “your” and “their” history.

I recently attended a conference of history education scholars from around the world. And there, I was intrigued to find that one of their chief concerns, no matter what country they called home, was deconstructing the idea that history’s purpose ultimately is to socialise people into their particular nation. Many, if not most of the scholars there rejected wholly the idea that history’s purpose is to create good citizens who all think about history in roughly the same way.

I was raised in an educational system that privileged national history, but I can see the power and appeal of their idea. Who is to say that “our” history extends only to the history of our nation? Isn’t the history of all humanity all our history? Sure, we instinctively as human animals are inclined to care more about our kin-groups than those outside them. But extending this idea out to the nation is a far bigger sell. Nation-states have a very vested interest in inculcating a sense of collective identity and history in their populace. And they have done so by dictating education curricula, days of commemoration and other ways of rendering the past into a coherent identity. Thus, “our history” implicitly ends at “our borders” in the same way that “our land” and “our people”, and “us” do.

But is that wholly true of the Middle Ages in the USA? Is it really so true that the Americas are so devoid of the medieval? Americans have had, and continue to have a peculiar relationship with the Middle Ages that does not fit within the usual chronological or cultural.

Give us your poor, your tired, your medieval…

Part of the American love affair with the Middle Ages relates to a collective and individual desire among white American people to see themselves as a product of a complex immigrant past. In the USA as in across Europe there was a revitalization of interest in the medieval world at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth. In Europe this worked in tandem with nationalistic movements which used the Middle Ages to define new identities for themselves. Perhaps not coincidentally, this period also saw a significant influx of immigrants to the USA, and also heralded the birth of the mass media.

John D. Rockefeller and other industrialists of the early American twentieth century famously felt that America was devoid of “culture”, and so they looked to Europe in order to acquire some. In Rockefeller’s case, this led to the importation of significant portions of five medieval abbeys, which were reconstructed as The Cloisters on the northern tip of Manhattan (which I will be talking about at greater length in a few weeks). The result of this was not just to define an American identity, but to argue that America’s common heritage is a European, medieval one. This is obviously a complex and thorny issue that I will be exploring in the coming weeks. But the overarching point here is that even though the USA might be mostly-devoid of its own Middle Ages, it is replete with medieval art and architecture collected or shipped from Europe wholesale. The Cloisters in New York. Dunbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. The medieval manuscript collection at the Library of Congress. The Royal Armouries, USA (at the Frazier Museum in Louisville, KY).

Add to those the thousands of churches built as imitators of European styles. And standing above them all, the National Cathedral, resplendent in its late-fourteenth century English Gothic style.

And those don’t even count the ways in which Americans most typically engage with the medieval past today: through reenactment, playful pastiche and popular culture. Faux-medieval Renaissance Faires. Medieval Times theme restaurants. HEMA groups. Films. TV shows. Video games. The SCA.

It may be odd to be a medievalist in America. But for a public medievalist, it’s just fine.

Buzzfeed has flooded everyone’s Facebook pages with a peculiar sort of public history.

This takes the form of quizzes with titles like Which Founding Father is your Soulmate?, Where Should You Go in a Time Machine, or What Period in History do you Really Belong in? They’re a silly bit of fun, to be certain, and obviously of very dubious quality. But they call towards a deeper impulse within public history: to imagine yourself in an historical context. It is first-person imaginative history, though of a very uncomplicated sort. This is the same way—though on a more sophisticated level—that participants in Renaissance Faires and historical re-enactors engage with the past. Though in my experience working with re-enactors previously, many of them tend to revel in an uncomplicated, romanticised version of the past.

But what happens if we complicate the idea and complicate the history? Is there any way that we can, in a more historically valid way, imagine ourselves in the past? And does our doing so offer us any further insights into the past or present?

As I have written in a forthcoming article, my first job in public history was as an historical interpreter at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. One of the most difficult conversations I had with visitors involved the question of slavery. Washington was a slave owner. And that fact caused cognitive dissonance in visitors—that one of the nation’s greatest heroes engaged in one of its greatest shames. Sometimes, their attempts to rectify this dissonance manifested as this question: “Was Washington good to his slaves?” When responding, I would offer the question: “How could you be good to a slave?” Some offered ideas like feeding them well, offering humane accommodation, or refraining from beating them. But I would often repeat my line of inquiry until they came to what I believe to be the best answer: you set them free.

Once this is established, we can then talk about how Washington compared to other slave owners. He stacks up about average. He enacted some cruelties against his slaves and some mercies. He famously freed all the slaves that he owned* but only upon his death, when they were, by definition, of no more use to him.

And this, I hope, went some way to imagining both our historical heroes and slave owners in a more complex and complete way. We must first establish and emphasise that slavery was wrong, full stop. And despite the standards of the day, it was evil— though it is part of the privileged position of the present that we see it that way. But not all slave owners were created equal; though slavery dirtied all the hands involved, some radical abolitionists did risk wealth, social standing and even their lives to do away with it. And on the other side, some hands are immeasurably dirty.

The film 12 Years a Slave does an excellent job of portraying the moral complexity of the institution of slavery. The director explicitly set out to portray, just as the memoir on which it is based does, the range and variety of people who engaged in, benefitted from and suffered under the slave trade. White people are shown benefitting actively or passively, militating against the system or enthusiastically embracing their abusive place within it. The African-American characters are similarly complex. Some passively accept the system, though most struggle, each in their own way, to find a way to survive or even benefit (for certain values of the word) within it. But the fear the system creates forces them often to comply with injustices. The protagonist, Solomon Northrop, is forced to whip another slave. The alternative would be to die. One of the fundamental cruelties of the system is that it encourages you, or even forces you to do horrible things in order to survive, in order to get by.

Reflecting on the film and my work at Mount Vernon, and considering the complex range of interactions with and reactions to slavery in Antebellum America, I find myself wondering how I would react if I was living as a white man in the south at that time. Certainly I— and I hope most people, would like to think that I would see slavery for what it was, an unmitigated evil, and fight against it. But that seems like too much wishful historical thinking—a projection of modern values onto an imaginary, romanticised past. Instead, I think it a better tack to really think about my own complex reactions to the thorny political and social issues of today, and see how my reactions to today’s injustices compare to a hypothetical person from the past.

Historians typically avoid discussing their own personal and political perspectives in their work for fear of being painted as unobjective or biased.

But I think when exploring history through this first-person imaginative space, it is important to do so.

Politically I tend to be very liberal, especially socially. I believe strongly in social justice, I am in favour of environmentalism, I am a feminist and am in favour of gay rights. But doing so is easy for me. I vote accordingly, and my teaching and writing reflects this perspective. But I doubt anyone would consider me a radical. I’ve only been to two protests, I’ve never broken the law in accordance with these beliefs (like, say, chaining myself to a tree or attacking whaling ships). I can only count one instance where I put myself any physical danger, defending a woman from a few drunk creeps, in accordance with my beliefs.

But I know that I let many things slide. I know that eating meat is very bad for the environment, but I am not a vegetarian. I try to conserve energy, but if it’s hot I will put on the AC. I am against sweatshops and refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, but don’t check the labels before I buy a t-shirt. I buy free range eggs, but don’t ask whether the restaurant does so before ordering breakfast. I have lent vocal support to my gay friends, but have neither sacrificed my time to march with them nor my money on donating to the cause. I am, I’m afraid to say, something of a liberal of convenience. Push does not generally come to shove about it, and if my support of those ideals threatened my life or safety, I’m afraid to say I would probably try to find a way to keep both my ideals and my life. I suspect many people behave in the same way.

So if I imagine myself realistically in the Antebellum south, who would I be? Not the passionate abolitionist, I’m afraid. I hate to say it, but I would likely be a character of convenient conscience. Had I owned slaves, I would probably free them in my will as Washington did, and think myself quite virtuous for doing so. In terms of Twelve Years a Slave, I might be a William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch’s character), a man who owns a slave plantation but seems to treat his slaves with relative kindness. But, he does not militate against the system or free his slaves and, when his safety is threatened by Solomon’s conflict with an overseer, elects to sell Solomon rather than risk himself. Or I hope I would be Samuel Bass (Brad Pitt’s character), a Canadian who is vocally against slavery and will argue convincingly against it because he risks little by talking. But when he is presented with an opportunity to right a serious wrong but, in attempting to do so, lose his job and risk his life, he does it. In so doing, he saves Solomon. Of course it’s important to point out that he only does so when the injustice he sees is made both personal—in that he knows and has come to respect Solomon—and also illegal— which gives him the ability to act against it by alerting the authorities. But notably, he does not try to free all slaves. He frees the one who begs him with tears in his eyes to do so, but only because he can do so without violating the law.

There are two ways to react from examining the past introspectively in this way. The first is complacency: to shrug one’s shoulders and fall back on the axiom that we all live according to the standards of our day. Surely there will always be injustice, and who am I to fight against my age?

The other, perhaps more interesting, way to view it is to use the past to reconsider my own actions in the present. If I really do feel strongly about social injustice, perhaps I should act more on my conscience, lest I continue to class myself as someone who might shrug and demure in the face of the injustices of the past.

Historians generally do not engage with the past in this fashion, and public attempts to do this too-often fall back onto cliché and romanticism. But there might be a way that historians can work together with their publics to better imagine, and appreciate, the complexity of past people by reflecting on the complexity of our present selves.

* Note: Washington freed all the slaves he owned, but most of the slaves held at Mount Vernon were owned by his wife’s family, and so he had no power to free them.

What does history do for us?

The question is simple enough, but it strikes at the heart of what I do as a public historian. Sure, we can retreat behind clichés like the George Santayana quote: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But when you consider that idea in depth —that we should use history as a way to make decisions in the present—it becomes thorny fast. Sure, maybe a better consideration of history might have indicated that the war in Iraq was a bad idea, and that it would lead to sectarian chaos in the region. But if we use the past this way, it only resigns us to powerlessness. If the world is simply destined to behave as it always has, how can we possibly change it?

When historians are confronted with the question of history’s value and relevance, many have difficulty answering. Sure, it is a complicated question, but unless we are able to answer succinctly and powerfully when asked, history as an academic discipline will be consigned to obscurity. There was once a time when historians could get away with saying that history was important and worth studying simply because it was. In light of aggressive funding cuts to the arts and humanities around the world, that time is over.

There are many possible answers to that question. And I’ll write more about them as time goes by. The one that I’ll start with is the most interesting one I’ve heard recently. The idea was explained most succinctly by John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and presenter of Crash Course World History – a Youtube series that presents, in fifteen minute increments, entertaining summaries of world history. Green’s idea is this: “The study of History allows you to empathize better; it allows you to think more complexly about others.” And the importance of empathy – even imaginative empathy towards historical people – should not be underestimated. Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University and author of the Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, (among many, manyothers), believes that empathy is the root of goodness in humans, and that a lack of empathy is the chief source of cruelty, barbarity and evil.

Baron-Cohen’s theories are of course more complex than that. And I am certainly not saying that studying history will make you a better person.

Actually, that is exactly what I’m saying.

History allows you to encounter people fundamentally different than yourself—people who grew up in a vastly different time and place, and who found themselves in an entirely different world than we see today. And yet, when read closely, we can see shadows of ourselves. I myself on a number of occasions, reading an old letter or standing in the keep of a shattered castle, have felt that I would not be so different from the people who lived there, who lived then. And that helps me, when reading stories about people today who live halfway across the world, to understand that even though they are in many ways totally different from me, they are complicated people doing their best to live a good life in their time.

Is this the only way to engage with history? Certainly not. But it is a useful one. So, the next time you are accosted at a dinner party and asked to justify why you are excited about the past, why you have dedicated your time to studying it, you could do worse than to answer “Because it makes me a better person.”

What do you think? How do you use the past? Have you encountered people in the past who help you to think about others?